ABSTRACT
The variety of individual differences is nearly boundless, yet most of these differences are insignificant in people's daily interactions with others and have remained largely unnoticed. Sir Francis Galton may have been among the first scientists to recognize explicitly the fundamental lexical hypothesisnamely that the most important individual differences in human transactions will come to be encoded as single terms in some or all of the world's languages. Indeed, Galton (1884) attempted to tap "the more conspicuous aspects of the character by counting in an appropriate dictionary," and he "estimated that it contained fully one thousand words ex.pressive of character, each of which has a separate shade of meaning, while each shares a large part of its meaning with some of the rest" (p.181).
